Music Documentary
Film Festival
of San Sebastian

7th — 12th january, 2019
12th edition

For eleven months we’ve asked ourselves who we are, what kind of festival we want to be, where we want to go. For eleven months we’ve viewed and studied the international music documentary panorama, a scene with growing numbers of propositions, all increasingly more adventurous. After 12 years on the go, we’ve probably come to the edition of Dock of the Bay that has been most pondered, most studied and most worked on.

Without turning our backs on the essence which has brought us this far as a festival, this edition represents a special challenge and an engagement by the competitive section to incorporate these new ways of telling stories. We want the tales to stay with us, to surprise us and to make us see music documentaries from new angles. That’s why we’ve brought to this Dock of the Bay these new points of view which pierce the stories of thrilling lives and play with formats that blow us away.

This pledge to new narrative forms has also prompted us to create Dock Live, a new section combining films and live music to give the audience the feeling of being involved something ephemeral, a one-off occasion that will never happen again.

We’ve also kept the two sections launched last year. Both Perfect Day, home of the most striking and prizewinning documentaries of the year, and Paint it Black, which will this year dedicate a retrospective to Fernando Trueba.

Regarding the other parallel areas, we’ll persist with the new audiences section dedicated to the younger among us, while continuing to meditate upon the relationship between music, literature and image with our seminar on the audio-visual world.

We could sum up this edition with the answer to the question we asked ourselves a year ago: Who are we? We’re a festival which functions like a living being that transforms during their lifetime, and has the sole aim of bringing us the best selection of the stories it discovers to make them strut their stuff on the big screen. Because if anything’s clear to us, it’s that we’re here because we very definitely want to be here, and because you’re here too. And, above all, because music and films make us very happy.

Welcome, yet another year, to Dock of the Bay.